What change are you pretending isn’t happening?

What some people find objectionable about the philosophy of a writer’s strike is, employees kind of believe that they’re owed a living as a writer.

And they’re not. This is show business, it’s make or miss. It’s true that without the writers, the entire industry would cease to exist. But to believe that they’re owed a living shows a profound lack of understanding about how things work.

The system of capitalism indicates compensation for labor. It’s an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. It’s a free market. Which means nobody is owed anything. There is no should. There is no deserve. There is no demand.

Even words like earn are tricky. That would be like a guy who can shred on the guitar believing he’s entitled to a job as a studio musician.

Doesn’t work that way. That musician has no rights. If a corporation is willing to pay him, then he can be paid for his services. If they are not, he doesn’t. Simple as that.

While the strikes are going on, television shows can go hire a single writer rather than of a whole room of them, and that’s their prerogative as a business. I’ve heard of streaming networks using remote teams of unpaid or low paid college interns who prompt artificial intelligence bots to write for them. Large language models help them write loglines, plot points, character descriptions, synopses of the movies, screenplay outlines, and so on. Streaming networks may never have to hire another writer again.

Now, that might be a dick move, but it’s not illegal. It may be unideal for the creators and consumers, but we can’t get angry at capitalists for trying to improve revenues and lower costs. I think writers are highly valuable, but then again, I’m a writer, so I am incentivized to believe that. It’s understandable why writers are skeptical about this technology imperiling their livelihoods.

But there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. It’s here and not going away any time soon. We all need to be thinking about how to use it in ways that advance the work and don’t limit us, but extend the reach of our creative powers.

I heard a fascinating conversation between two comedy writers on the subject. Maher explained the writer’s strike from the perspective of evolution.

Of course networks want to make good television and they wanna make money. But there’s nothing that’s more guaranteed than people are gonna sit on their asses and watch a lot of screens. And the technology changes, everything else has to change behind it. Otherwise they are the dinosaurs suing the ice age. Technology is what deals you the cards you have to play. Decades ago in an earlier writer’s strike, the writers went out and what did television do? They invented the reality show. Which put more of them out of work than ever.

Maher’s point echoes the fundamental law of human evolution. It doesn’t favor the strong, only the most adaptable.

What change are you pretending isn’t happening? Are you surfing the waves of change so that you don’t drift out to sea?

Listen, no matter what our egos say, nobody is owed anything in this life. I know it’s unfashionable not to be a victim these days, but we need to take our own fate into our own hands. We must use the winds and tides to our advantage.

Let’s let go of entitlement language like should and deserve and demand and earn. There may be a strike going on outside of the office building, but inside of our hearts and minds, we are on the clock, working diligently, feeling grateful to be alive, and deploying our gifts in the service of improving ourselves and the world.

Now, that might be too many words to fit on a picket sign, but maybe there’s a chatbot that can help me write more concisely.

What change are you pretending isn’t happening?